New book: Tiger is his father's son, in more ways than one

FILE - This April 4, 1995, file photo shows amateur golfer Tiger Woods, right, talking with his father, Earl Woods, after practice for the Masters, at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga. Tom Callahan met Earl Woods in 1996 at the Greater Milwaukee Open, where Tiger made his pro debut, and he spent the next 10 years listening to stories and gaining insight. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta, File)
— AP

FILE - This April 4, 1995, file photo shows amateur golfer Tiger Woods, right, talking with his father, Earl Woods, after practice for the Masters, at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga. Tom Callahan met Earl Woods in 1996 at the Greater Milwaukee Open, where Tiger made his pro debut, and he spent the next 10 years listening to stories and gaining insight. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta, File)
/ AP

In the roaring, 24-hour news cycle that was the aftermath of the Tiger Woods’ sex scandal when it broke nearly 11 months ago, the question was posed time and again:

What would Earl Woods think of this epic personal disaster?

Everybody knew the tight bond Earl and his son had. They were so enmeshed that Earl contended Tiger could always hear his instructions, even if Earl was on the couch in California and Tiger was playing in Georgia.

Could he speak from the grave? Nike, scrambling to repair their icon’s image, basically made it so when it produced a creepy ad for this year’s Masters in which Earl was essentially talking to Tiger from beyond.

Tiger, looking chastised and forlorn in black and white, listens as Earl says, “I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?”

Did he learn anything?

“Of course, I did, Pops,” Tiger could have said. “I learned it all from you.”

No doubt Earl Woods would have been horrified that his son got caught cheating on his wife, Elin, with more than a dozen women (that we know about), leaving his rock-strong image in rubble. But if he had chastised him for the very acts, Earl would have been the ultimate hypocrite.

As chronicled in Tom Callahan’s new book, “His Father’s Son,” due out Oct. 28, Tiger grew up watching his father unashamedly dally with women outside of his marriage. Indeed, Tiger would not exist if Earl hadn’t left his first wife, Ann, and their three children to marry Kultida Punsawad, a secretary 12 years his junior whom he struck up an affair with while stationed with the Army in Thailand.

In Callahan’s account, Tiger had to save Earl at least once with some kind of payoff to keep a woman quiet. Tiger was furious about it, and it created a rift between the two that, ironically, had to be repaired by Tida Woods, who hadn’t been living with Earl in their Cypress home since soon after Tiger turned pro.

“Any woman who ventured within fifty feet of Earl was a potential plaintiff,” Callahan writes.

Earl’s own sister, Mae, tells Callahan, “Oh Lord. If he had been my husband, I’d have shot him.”

Callahan, a contributing editor to Golf Digest and former Washington Postcolumnist, didn’t set out to write a scandalous book about Earl or Tiger, and it is not.

He began the work long before Tiger’s meltdown because he wanted to more definitively tell Earl’s life story while illuminating the ties that bound him to his son.

But once the scandal broke, Callahan could not ignore what he had seen and heard through more than a decade of being as much inside the Woods family as almost any journalist could be.

He was fond of and close to Earl, whom he calls “vainglorious” and a “world-class braggart.” Callahan regularly watched the major championships on television with Earl, and he was welcome anytime in the Cypress house. He spent time with Earl shortly before he died in May 2006.

Callahan became particularly tight with Earl after his 2003 book, “In Search of Tiger,” in which he chronicled going to Vietnam to search for the soldier after whom Earl named his son. When Callahan discovered that Col. Nguyen “Tiger” Phong had died in 1976, he arranged an emotional meeting of the families.

“I liked Earl,” Callahan writes in his latest effort. “I’m just glad he wasn’t around for the Christmas season of 2009, even if there might have been some justice to that.”

Some of the things Earl said to Callahan raise the hair on the back of our neck now. Such as:

“Everybody Tiger has fired was let go for one reason, always the same reason: betrayal. Loyalty is number one to Tiger. If you’re not loyal, you’re history.”

The portrait of Tiger is one of a man living on an island, unwilling or unable to let even those closest to him share much of his life.

Among the book’s most poignant accounts are those by Tiger’s three half-siblings, all of whom lived with him at some point at the house in Cypress as they went through what they called Earl Woods’ “finishing school.”

They have fond memories of Tiger saying “sand twap” and “wa-wa” for a water hazard, and of playing Spiderman with him in the backyard. But though he’s provided them with money through the years, he has given little of himself.

“He and I have no relationship anymore,” said Earl Dennison Woods Jr., who goes by “Den.” “I just got tired of trying to reach him. He’s a solo flier.

“… My dad was more his best friend than his father, I believe. They were each other’s best friends. You see, the three of us were raised as family. But he was raised as an individual. Tiger’s whole world revolved around Tiger. I’m sorry he didn’t learn to value family. I honestly am. Sorry for him.”

Royce Woods, Earl’s only daughter, would take leave from her job and move from San Jose to take care of her father in his final months. She recalled being distraught at the funeral and receiving hugs from Tiger.

“I thought at the time it was genuine,” she told Callahan. “But ask me today. I just don’t feel, I just don’t believe, he’s genuine. I think he pretends. With Tiger, you always ask yourself later, ‘Was it real?’ “

Earl Woods was gushingly proud of all he taught Tiger, but he failed badly in at least one lesson.

“He was the one who gave Tiger the dream. He was the one who taught him how to achieve it,” Callahan writes. “Of course, he was also the one who showed him … how to spoil it. Were the women what made Earl and Tiger tick, or were they just what made them human? You tell me.”